[Devlog] Lewd Dragon Game 0.1.09.0 ALPHA

Advanced Character Posing Part 1

This update is the start of me rebuilding the posing system to actually do what you'd expect. Some of the problems I'm solving are the same ones every character sex game has. Others are specific to how I'm building things. Either way, the goal is a system that lets you pose any character, any size, quickly and without crashing out.

What I'm working on

You should be able to:

• Pose the entire character, limbs and all

• Move just the head, torso, and butt as a group

• Adjust the head, torso, and butt individually

Yes, it's as annoying to implement as it sounds.

Movable waist and movable butts

If you’ve ever tried to angle a character’s butt and ended up dragging their whole body with it, you already know the problem. To get the perfect angle, you usually have to pose the whole body around the butt, instead of just moving the butt directly. That’s backwards, and it's because of how most 3D characters are set up.

In most rigs, the hips are the root bone. That means everything else is a child of that one bone, and when you move it, the rest of the body comes along for the ride. That’s not a special feature, it’s just how bone hierarchies work. The pelvis moves, so everything else does too. If you want to break that behavior, you have to do more complex rigging. Which is work. Annoying work.

Most games don’t bother, because moving the whole character at once is "good enough." But I needed better. So even in Unreal’s extremely outdated bone system, I got it working. It took a lot of math. That’s really all there is to it.

Moving the entire character

There’s a proper “move all” button on the controller. Press it, and you can move the character like a statue, from wherever you're grabbing. It's not tied to some specific body part, because that makes no sense when characters can be ten feet tall.

If you want to move the torso or butt without affecting the limbs, you grab those areas directly. You know. Like how you'd expect it to work in the first place. If you want to move the entire head / torso / butt / tail, you just grab the midriff.

What's next

This is just the beginning. There’s still work to do on tail posing, dragon necks, and improving the overall feel of posing. Those updates will roll out over time.

Also, there's now a new test level with a sunset skybox. I’m trying out a few minimal maps to see what looks best and keeps performance solid.